Thirty years ago, America declared war against fat. The inaugural edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published in 1980 and subsequently updated every five years, advised people to steer clear of “too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol,” because of purported ties between fat intake and heart disease. The message has remained essentially the same ever since, with current guidelines recommending that Americans consume less than 10 percent of their daily calories from saturated fat.
But heart disease continues to devastate the country, and, as you may have noticed, we certainly haven’t gotten any thinner. Ultimately, that’s because fat should never have been our enemy. The big question is whether the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, due out at the end of the year, will finally announce retreat.
Sooooo… That food pyramid heavy on the stuff ADM sells (Gee, I wonder how that happened?) turns out to not be all that good for you. Kinda like that “the sun is bad for you” bullshit caused people to not get enough vitamin D.
I find this part both typical and repugnant:
According to Meir Stampfer, a Harvard professor of nutrition and epidemiology who worked on the 2000 guidelines, scientists on this year’s committee know perfectly well what the evidence says. But few researchers want to shake the status quo or risk confusing the public. Robert Post, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, admits that when it comes to nutritional recommendations, “simple messages, few messages, targeted messages, are very important.” Ultimately, then, policymakers have to choose between keeping the message consistent and actually getting it right.
I’m not that old, but I’ve been around long enough to notice a trend:
When the government tells you something, more often than not, it’s wrong.
Yet another reason to not listen to the idiots in DC. Pass the bacon!
Imagine that. After an exhaustive study, it turns out that food is food.
Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.
Maybe because “organic” is a scam to sell inferior quality food at higher prices?
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.
A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.
That’s because food is food and it doesn’t matter how it’s grown.
Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless.
When I started making a significantly higher income than my wife, we decided that she didn’t have to work full time any more. It was mostly her decision, but we were both a lot happier. That was over fifteen years ago, and when our daughter arrived (Via de stoik, ya know) in 2000, there was no worry about lost income or finding day care. In our case it’s worked out well.
Of course if she’d stayed in the full time work force we could have nearly double the income we have now, but at what cost?
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